MANAGED FILE TRANSFER 101
Managed File Transfer:
The “What”, “Why”, and “How”
What is Managed File Transfer? Why are so many IT departments
investing in Managed File Transfer?And how can file transfers
be “managed”?Learn to simplify the file transfer process,
gain visibility and control, and achieve compliance without the
headaches and the hassle.
www.IpswitchFT.com
What is “Managed File Transfer”?
Just what is managed file transfer (MFT)? It’s easy to think of MFT as
little more than file transfer on steroids, or a super slick FTP server. But
MFT is more than that because the problems IT administrators solve
with MFT demand more. Our customers don’t move files for fun – they
move files to get work done.
“
If you don’t have a good file transfer
system in place, IT ends up having to
do a lot of extra work to manage all of
those file transfer processes, often on
an ad hoc basis.”
Analyst Michael Osterman
MFT is a category of middleware software that ensures reliable, secure and auditable file transfer to enable
critical business process. But even though File Transfer is at the core of MFT, it’s the ‘M’ in MFT that sets the
category apart.
Back in the Day…
There was a time when an organisation in need of file transfer infrastructure would reach for a basic FTP server by default.
That was the answer if you needed to make files available to partners, create a space where partners could drop files into
a process, and script all around those activities to keep things moving while maintaining some sense of security. But as file
volumes went up, and the range of processes that involve file exchange broadened, so too did the number and variety of
software solutions that could help to accomplish the goal.
In recent history, we have seen the emergence of a new category, the so-called Enterprise File Synchronisation and
Sharing (EFSS). This category of mostly personal tools helps individuals share files between their myriad devices, including
smartphones, tablets, home and work computers. While easy for end users, these mostly cloud services have become a real
problem for IT departments. That’s because the simplicity, openness, and device-friendliness they allow come at a real costs to
the control, visibility, and security protections that are the IT department’s responsibility.
New Demands for Security and Compliance
In addition to pleasing end users, IT also has to please the businesses they serve, and on that side of the ledger things have
grown more complex too. Today, the variety of business processes that depend on reliable file transfer is up and the volume of
transfer activity is up. The need to manage all of this activity under a tighter security and compliance regimen means nothing
can be left to chance.
Where simple FTP was once sufficient, today IT has to reach for more capable infrastructure that mixes the end-user simplicity
of EFSS with the reliability of FTP and the business-process focus of integration middleware. But they need to do this in a way
that doesn’t inadvertently make what has traditionally been a solvable problem into a messy, bespoke custom development
situation. The last thing they want to do is to engage “solutions vendors” with their bag of forty tools, complemented by
expensive internal developers and systems integrators.
Managed File Transfer: The “What”, “Why”, and “How”
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This is where MFT fits in.
MFT is a purpose-specific class of middleware focused on the reliable
transfer of files between business parties, using simple, secure protocols and
easy-to-understand models of exchange. But it’s fortified with security,
manageability, scalability, file processing and integration, and business-reporting
options that allow IT to deliver more sophisticated, controlled file-transfer
solutions without slipping into the custom-code abyss.
You can’t responsibly leave the
reliability, security, visibility,
and control of these file
transfers supporting your
business processes to chance.
Read on for a deeper dive into each facet of MFT, including:
• Tools for end-user access: The ways users can participate in MFT-driven business processes using the skills
they already possess, and tools that leverage already familiar activities, like sending email attachments or
working in local folders.
• File-transfer automation and workflow: The ways that file transfer can be put to work, either through the
handling and preparation of files for further processing, or the standards-based handoff of files, metadata, or
both to the next step in a business process.
• Reporting and analytics: The importance of visibility into the volume, history, and current activity of a 24/7
MFT flow into and out of your business, and the importance of end-to-end visibility in linking that traffic to
your business.
• MFT administration: From security and compliance to topologies that deliver high availability, performance
under load, and efficiency of operations.
Why the “M” In Managed File Transfer?
Your organisation is sending more information electronically than ever before.
We’re IT people, so we know that businesses are transferring more information electronically than ever before between
employees, business partners, and customers. We’re exchanging information to improve our top line—perhaps increasing the
number of business partners or volume of transactions— and to improve our business processes and efficiency.
Files move as part of a business process and need to stay connected to it.
After years of developing and supporting Managed File Transfer (MFT) systems with thousands of customers, we know that the
“smart money” companies think about their file movement through the lens of their business processes – or how their business
works.
Let’s take the process of reporting an accident to an insurance company as one example of the many reasons files move to get
work done.
Managed File Transfer: The “What”, “Why”, and “How”
2
Customer
Service
Customer
Insurance
Company
Partner/Underwriter
Mobile Claims Agent
• While at an accident scene, a mobile claims agent receives a customer’s insurance policy, which has been sent
from the policy system of record.
• The agent views the policy on a tablet, and then uploads information and pictures of the accident, which are
sent back to the customer’s master record in the policy system.
• The new information is shared, or “moved” to the claims processors as well.
• Perhaps during the process, the claim is transferred to a business partner, or underwriter, and then returned.
• Customer service then reaches out to the customer, sending a summary of the claim and the pictures.
Your business is likely moving a lot of files between people, systems, and businesses too. They may be sent as part of a more
tightly defined business process like the insurance example above, or they may be more loosely defined. But the common
denominator is that each file movement is part of a process.
That leads to a few realisations:
• That file based processes need to work for business to get done. There’s no margin for error.
• That files need to stay associated with the process – such as a patient’s permanent record
• While systems often move files, people are a critical element of the process
• You can’t responsibly leave the reliability, security, visibility, and control of these file transfers supporting your
business processes to chance. That would expose your business to an awful lot of risk.
An MFT System brings order, predictability, and security to file movement
– improving business performance and reducing risk.
Think of the all the types of file transfers within your business that are associated with file-based business processes. An MFT
system can bring security, reliability, visibility, and control to those processes – with very little effort.
Read on for more on what your MFT system should support in order to get you these critical outcomes of security, reliability,
visibility and control around your business processes.
Managed File Transfer: The “What”, “Why”, and “How”
3
What You Need in an MFT System
to Make Your Processes More
Reliable and Secure
In the last section, we shared—based on our experience developing and supporting
managed file transfer systems—what impact a business can expect from their
Managed File Transfer system. It comes down to making business processes driven
IT gains quick, positive
impact with improved
speed and reliability of
mission-critical business
processes
by file movement (and really, which ones aren’t?) more secure and reliable with
increased visibility and control.
To accomplish this, the MFT system needs to provide:
Security, and lots of it: There are two key components to security. First, there’s the security of the MFT system itself and
the content within it. Be sure your MFT vendor protects you from the latest list of vulnerabilities. Make sure they do things
like PEN testing, static and dynamic code analysis. Second, you need security features that manage access and integrate
easily with your business’s security systems.
Reliability: It is your business that runs on file movement. So make sure the system will transfer information reliably and
alert you to any issues. Reputation here is critical.
Automated movement of files: After all, this is a business process. Once a file enters the MFT system, it needs to move
to the right place. Perhaps to its permanent record location or to the next place work needs to get done. Simple, reliable
automation is required to keep your business moving and improve productivity.
Visibility and control of file movement: With all the movement of files, you need a system which gives you visibility into
where each file went, confirmation it arrived on time, as well as control of those destinations and movement.
Compliance: Yes, we all answer to someone. When you have to meet your compliance requirements for reporting or
discovery, an MFT system can help take the pain out of it.
Integration with existing tools: A big part of any process has to include people communicating, not just systems. Your MFT
system should make it easy for people to receive and send their files. For your employees to adopt it, this has to be through
familiar, easy-to-use tools such as web interfaces and email. After all, 90% of all information shared between people takes
place via email.
Seamless access across mobile and desktop platforms: As you extend your processes to mobile devices, look for a solution
that can include mobile in file-based business processes. Files can be accessed, or entered, from a mobile device – even
sent to other people – while still being connected to your business process. This goes way beyond the collaborationfocused choices in the market – this is Mobile MFT.
Managed File Transfer: The “What”, “Why”, and “How”
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So, why are the “enlightened” buying into an MFT System these days? They recognise:
• Organisations move lots of files between business, systems, and people
• Files move as part of a business process, even to mobile employees or partners
• A system must move files securely and keep them associated with the right business process
• There are cost effective, easy choices for Managed File Transfer available today
• IT gains quick, positive impact with improved speed and reliability of mission-critical business processes
• IT gains visibility and control, as well as reduced exposure compared to the less reliable, insecure, and
disparate systems approach many use today.
Four Reasons Every Business Needs an MFT Solution
There was a time when managed file transfer (MFT) solutions were considered a luxury; a nice-to-have for IT departments and
large organisations. Those days are gone. Today, MFT has become mission-critical, particularly for those in the financial services
and healthcare industries.
But why – what is driving this shift to managed file transfer inside so many businesses today?
To address this question, we brought together three Ipswitch File Transfer customers and an industry analyst for a roundtable
discussion. The panel of subject experts were:
• Mark Holman, Cambridge Public Services Architect, Cambridgeshire County Council
• Rebecca Freise, Automation Application Specialist for Oppenheimer Funds
• Regan McBride, Business Process Automation Consultant to multiple businesses including VIVA Health
• Michael Osterman, Principal at Osterman Research
Here’s what we learned from the panel:
1. Security is not an option (it’s a necessity).
These days, it’s hard to find a company that isn’t letting employees work remotely, that doesn’t have employees using mobile
devices to get work done, and that doesn’t have a set of employees using a consumer-esqe file management tool like Dropbox.
While convenient for some, these policies are a nightmare for IT departments, who must ensure that file transfers are both
secure and auditable. Michael Osterman explains the dilemma:
“You may have sensitive or confidential content sent in violation of the corporate regulations or a variety
of regulatory statutes. In many cases, IT simply can’t audit that content. They don’t know where it’s
going. They don’t know how long it’s going to live. They don’t know who sent it to whom and how it was
disseminated from there.”
See the problem? On a fundamental level, IT requires visibility and control of the entire file transfer process – something all the
panelists agreed on – and the only way to ensure this level of control is through an MFT solution.
Managed File Transfer: The “What”, “Why”, and “How”
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2. You can’t risk violating regulations.
Without an MFT solution, companies run the risk of violating a growing number of statutes and regulations designed to protect
sensitive data from being breached. In fact, many businesses will find that regulatory requirements are the primary reason for
adopting MFT.
3. It’s not just about moving files, it’s about supporting business process.
Managed file transfer is not about supporting the frivolous transfer of files between employees. It’s about supporting efficient
file transfer as part of a business process – and therefore allows IT to better manage what happens next to the files or data.
Mark Holman explained:
“The major challenge was to ﬁnd a way to protect and share our top-tier data with other stakeholders,
whether that meant with the police, social services or another council. But we also needed a system we
could trust, that users would be keen to adopt, and which would give us the conﬁdence to transfer large
ﬁles or sensitive data quickly, easily, and in a totally secure and traceable manner.”
A managed file transfer system not only manages the file transfer, but also tracks the file’s connection to the corresponding
business process, whether that business process is another system, a desktop user or a mobile user.
4. MFT makes life easier for IT teams.
This may best explain the continued adoption of MFT: MFT systems help make life easier for IT teams, addressing pain points
such as audits and reporting, and freeing up time to focus on more important tasks – instead of wasting time dealing with ad
hoc file transfer requests, sifting through file transfer data to debug an issue, and locating lost files.
Rebecca Freise shared that prior to their MFT system,
“We had issues with researching and finding specific transmissions and reporting on specific timeframes
of file transmissions. And then trying to do an audit and report on specific clients was difficult and very
time-consuming. Just doing any kind of research on any transmission was difficult. It took a lot of meeting
hours to get things accomplished.”
And as Michael Osterman explained further,
“If you don’t have a good file transfer system in place, IT ends up having to do a lot of extra work to
manage all of those file transfer processes, often on an ad hoc basis. The creation and maintenance of
file transfer technologies becomes a real burden for IT simply because they have to do things like write
custom scripts to move files, they need to build additional security around FTP servers that in many cases
are just inherently insecure, they have to devote IT staff resources to manage the file transfer process
where they otherwise wouldn’t have to if you had a good solution in place, and they have to use staff
resources to manage all of the security and really the risk mitigation that goes along with file transfer.”
And in days of tightening budgets and strained resources, what IT group wouldn’t take something that can save precious time
and remove some day-to-day headaches?
Managed File Transfer: The “What”, “Why”, and “How”
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Using Managed File Transfer Automation to Get Work Done
Moving files from point A to point B is pretty much never an end in itself. Rather, files get moved in the service of larger
goals and processes that bind business partners together: Things like order-to-cash, insurance-claims adjudication, or content
syndication, to name a few. At some point in each of these business processes, one or more files move between parties. In fact,
that file transfer may be the critical bit of connective tissue that ties the parties together. But the story never ends there.
MFT is all about moving files to get work done, and in many cases the MFT system is doing some of that work, whether it be to:
• Automate repetitive processes
• Intelligently route content based on surface or deep metadata in the files
• Process files to prepare them for the next step in a flow
• Integrate with other systems to bind transfer events directly to the back office
So how does all this play out in the business world? Consider the following examples, all drawn from real customers:
A large healthcare provider does business with a nationwide network of hospitals that deliver
employee time card information as scan files, using an automated-delivery client. When the scans
arrive, the MFT system responds by checking the files, logging their arrival and other metadata, and
then routing the files to a records-management system to be processed.
An insurance company receives formal requests for claims information from outside partners,
and responds by piecing together content from an internal document-management system. When
request files arrive, they are processed and interrogated, and data from the claims is used to retrieve
the correct content from their document repository. The result is delivered back to the requester as a
package assembled using the APIs of the MFT system.
A software services company utilises secure MFT in order to move large packages of sensitive
data related to technical-support cases back and forth between technical support and end customers.
The files could be database content (with sensitive patient data or social security numbers) or
executables too large for other means of exchange. When files arrive, processing in the MFT solution
connects them to support records to maintain the continuity of the support experience and history.
Every one of these examples involves the transfer of files between parties, as well as the handling and processing of these files
to achieve some greater end. In the case of the healthcare provider, the files are checked for validity, and then routed directly
to a backend system in a straight-through process. In the case of the insurance company, the MFT system and the document
repository interact with one another through an additional bit of custom code that utilises the APIs of each to automate a
process. In the case of the software services company, managed file transfer automation is used to intelligently bind delivered
contents to records in a support system.
Managed File Transfer: The “What”, “Why”, and “How”
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The patterns in these examples represent the rule with MFT, not the exception. It is never the case that the mere arrival of a
file represents the end of the process. Typically, it is the start of a process, or the bit of tissue that links two or more parties in a
business process.
That’s why a capable MFT system needs to support options that include:
• Basic file-handling operations like renaming, padding/trimming, and metadata augmentation
• Archive/package handling operations like zip/unzip, encrypt/decrypt
• Integrity checking operations like validation of structured documents, translation or transformation
• Data clearing operations like Anti-virus and Data-loss-preventions workflows
• Standards-based integration options that allow for custom interactions between MFT and other systems
driven by code or scripts
• Basic Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL) operations that allow content to be loaded into a data-base for
further processing
So how are you handling your end-to-end processes today when it comes to file transfer? Are you finding
gaps in your processes because your file-transfer solution doesn’t support the range of tasks needed to
ensure security and smooth file exchanges?
Managed File Transfer: The “What”, “Why”, and “How”
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Next Steps
MOVEit is a managed file transfer (MFT) system that transfers business files reliably and securely,
automates file-based business workflows, and provides employees with an IT-approved solution to send
files. MOVEit provides visibility and control over all file transfer activity and enables you to confidently
meet your SLAs and compliance requirements.
To Learn More, visit www.IpswitchFT.com
• View in-depth product demos
• Speak to an MFT Specialist
• Browse our Managed File Transfer Content Resources
• Request a Free Trial
Ipswitch File Transfer provides solutions that move, govern and secure business information between employees, business partners
and customers. The company’s proven solutions lead the industry in terms of ease of use, allowing companies of all sizes to take control
of their sensitive and vital information and improve the speed of information flow. Ipswitch lets business and IT managers govern data
transfers and file sharing with confidence and enable compliance by balancing the need for end user simplicity with the visibility and
control required by IT. Ipswitch File Transfer solutions are trusted by thousands of organizations worldwide, including more than 90% of
the Fortune 1000, government agencies, and millions of prosumers. For more information on Ipswitch File Transfer and its products, go
to www.IpswitchFT.com.
Managed File Transfer: The “What”, “Why”, and “How”
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Copyright © 2013, Ipswitch, Inc. All rights reserved. MOVEit is a registered trademark of Ipswitch, Inc. Other products or company names are or may be trademarks or registered trademarks and are the propery of their respective holders.
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